RURAL FREE

When I was in Indiana over Christmas I came across this book and knew I had to read it.  I didn't buy it right then, but Erik later gave it to me for part of my anniversary gift.  I finished it last month and just loved it.  Originally published in 1961 by Rachel Peden, a self-described "Indiana farm wife", this book is a lyrical month-by-month chronicle of life on a southern Indiana farm in the 1950s.  It is also filled with really great drawings by Sidonie Coryn (who did the original illustrations for Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking).

This book made me take pride in my Hoosier roots but also mourn the bygone days of an America that I will never be able to experience.  Is modern life so fast and Internet-driven that we can no longer take joy in the simple things?  I don't think so, especially if we can see the world as this author did.  Her descriptions of "the lonely, beautiful cry of wild geese," an outdoor autumn baptism taking place under a bridge "concealed by the vine-tangled lofty tops of trees," her husband feasting on "corn bread and apple butter, boiled beans, onions in vinegar, fried ham, and Dutch apple pie," and her memorable experience of participating in a daybreak Easter morning church service on a "hilltop clover field in front of her woods" all make me wish I lived 50 years ago.  Reading this book renewed my desire to try to take in more of the beauty and wisdom that this world has to offer.  Here is a passage from the book that I really loved:

Sometimes in the still mornings of these wonderful sunlit days, when the very air is the color of thoughtfulness, the earth and the fullness thereof seem to contain some poignant message, ancient and persistent.  Before daybreak, hearing the dove sing so close to the farmhouse wall, her voice like a pointed finger, velvet-gloved but inquiring; or a sparrow repeating her thoughts in quick, swept syllables like a woman sweeping the crumbs from the tablecloth into her other, cupped hand; or in midmorning hearing the thrush singing like a stone being shaken in a big gourd, I hear the message, but I cannot quite interpret it.  I hear it when the limbs of the maple tree stroke the walls of the house, and the wind rises, and the soft brush of rain begins.  I see it in the sun-struck glint of cornfields; in the tiny restless lanterns of firefies rising from the grass on July evenings, going on and off and rising higher each time until they reach the level of tall trees.  It is in the cut wheat field, brown and tidy as a hairbrush, and in the sharp, clear cry of the quail nearby.  It is in the ragged blue patches on tall vervain stalks and the intensely bright blue rounds of chickory; in the wild dark-blue larkspur; and in the dusky brown centers of black-eyed Susans. I smell it in the elderberry fragrance drifting in from the pale ivory-colored bloom; and in the first velvety, ripe peaches; and in the first big drops of rain on the ground after a long drought, and in the sweetness of hay, curing in the hot window.  When I tried to express this to Mr. Hanger, bookshop owner and preacher, I could not.  He nodded-and we both knew he understood. (pg. 324)

I think I have moments where I understand too.  I hope I can have more.  Thanks, Mrs. Peden, for this beautiful and poetic book.

Photo of Rachel Peden